How Qaddafi Reshaped Africa

The Libyan leader's dark legacy already includes some of the continent's worst regimes and conflicts

Whenever most of us think of oil-rich, Arab-speaking countries, our
imagination performs a trick with our sense of geography, placing us by
default in the Middle East.

Of the three North African countries
at the heart of the popular uprisings that have riveted the world over
the last several weeks, Libya's Muammar Qaddafi has always done the most
to assert his country's African identity, staking its prestige, its
riches and his own personal influence above all on its place in the
continent.

As a deep-pocketed and sparsely populated state ever
in need of labor, it has always made sense for Qaddafi to look south.
Libya is far too small and peripheral for it to ever aspire to real
influence in the Arab world. By comparison, the almost equally small but
far poorer countries of nearby West Africa, wracked as they are with
chronic misrule and instability, loom temptingly on the horizon as fruit
ripe for picking.

Whatever our loose or flawed sense of
geography tells us, things have always been thus. For at least 1,000
years, Morocco's kingdoms have periodically thrust southward,
establishing shape-shifting realms from present-day Niger all the way to
Senegal.

Qaddafi's big idea was to meld a modern, anti-Western,
anti-imperial discourse with an impassioned pan-Africanism, an ideal
that still resonates deeply across the continent.

For decades in
Africa, Qaddafi has put his money where his mouth was: showering
petro-dollars on favored clients, funding liberation groups, nurturing
political movements, and even paying civil servants. To make sure that
no one missed the message, he has often paid a huge portion of the
operating costs of the continental body, the African Union.

The
problem with Qaddafi's pan-Africanism, like his rule in general is that
it has steadily turned into a vessel for his megalomania.

As a
reporter with a career-long association with the African continent, I
have been in a rare position to witness this trend beginning with some
of Qaddafi's earliest African exploits.

In 1983, I scrambled from
Ivory Coast to Chad to witness the breakout of war between French and
Libyan forces there. Qaddafi had recently spoken of fully "integrating"
his country with its southern neighbor.

I quickly found my way
to the eastern front, where I watched the conflict from a desert foxhole
with French soldiers as they spotted screaming, low-flying Jaguar
fighter bombers pounding Libyan positions nearby. That same year, I
traveled to Burkina Faso, where Qaddafi had flown to celebrate the
seizure of power by a charismatic young army captain, Thomas Sankara,
who he clearly saw as a promising understudy.

They met at a
military base near the border with Ghana. From there, Sankara's comrade,
Blaise Compaoré had recently rallied paratroopers to free Sankara from
detention and install him as president.

When I showed up,
Qaddafi, surrounded by his famous all female bodyguard corps, angrily
objected to my presence and demanded that Sankara not allow an American
to ride with the motorcade for their triumphal, flag-waving trip to the
capital, Ouagadougou. Sankara, who already knew me well, insisted on my
presence. Four years later, he would be dead, murdered by Compaoré, it
is widely believed, with Qaddafi's encouragement.

The Libyan's
determination to eliminate his erstwhile protégé had nothing to do with
me, of course. Most signs point instead to Sankara's refusal to
acquiesce in a much bigger decision: to sponsor an invasion of Liberia
by Charles Taylor, a leader who is now before the Hague on war crime
charges related to his instigation of what would go on to become one of
Africa's most horrific conflicts.

Taylor, a kindred megalomaniac,
who was trained and financed by Libya, invaded Liberia in 1989. A few
years later, I would cover that war for The New York Times as well,
watching the rebel leader ride one of the first mass deployments of
child soldiers into power.

Were it not for the British
intervention in Sierra Leone's civil war next door, another Libyan
project, the Taylor-Qaddafi axis would have taken over that country
next, before turning its sights on other wobbling dominos nearby,
whether Guinea or Ivory Coast. From Liberia, I went to Zaire to cover
the fall of Mobutu Sese Seko at the hands of Laurent Kabila, an obscure
revolutionary who had cut his teeth in 1960 liberation movements before
seemingly going into hibernation. Although Rwanda was his main patron,
it turns out that Qaddafi had invested in Kabila, too.

A map of
the places where I watched Qaddafi play similar games would stretch from
Seychelles to the Central African Republic to Guinea, far vaster even
than the Moroccan domains of old.

Even today, when one looks
around the continent at zones of conflict, it's a safe bet that the
Libyan leader has a line in, ever willing to take long odds that
eventually his strategy of cobbling together a pan-African realm will
pan out.

As such dreams crumble along with his power, however,
Qaddafi will leave a final destabilizing legacy for the continent. Among
the million-plus sub-Saharan migrants living in his country, many have
already faced suspicion and brutal reprisals because of Qaddafi's use of
black mercenaries as a desperate, final rampart.

But there is
worse still. It is all but certain that there are new Charles Taylors
out there, trained and armed by Qaddafi and eager to mount violent bids
for power. And with their patron going down in flames, they will be
heading home.